Nor, however, was he one to waste materials or labor. David remembered a passage from the Key, where Cellini had written of the torment he’d endured constructing La Medusa, and of the casts he had made prior to hitting on the right one: “Il bicchiere deve essere perfettamente smussato, il puro argento: un unico difetto, non importa quanto piccola, si annulla la magia del tutto.” The glass must be perfectly beveled, the silver welded; a single flaw, no matter how tiny, will undo the magic of the whole. David was now confronted with two possibilities—one, that Cellini had made the Medusa and, after discovering that it did not work, repurposed it as a present to a wealthy patron. Or that he had simply bestowed on the Medici an early cast, a reject, one that he had never intended to imbue with the waters from the sacred pool at all.
And wasn’t that just like him, to muddy the trail of something valuable? The same man who had created an optical illusion in his most famous statue, or who had made strongboxes with coded locks, who kept the greatest advancements of his trade to himself, and limited the secrets of his sorcery to the unpublished Key, was not likely to leave his most ingenious achievement baldly exposed.
Cellini was a trickster, and David had to figure out how, over the centuries, this particular trick played out.
He quickly turned to the next page, which began with an account of some marble imported for a bathhouse. He jumped ahead several leaves, past some other mundane expenditures, until he found a later annotation, made in another hand, saying, “Un regalo al de’Medici della Catherine, sul decimo del settembre 1572.” Or, a gift to Catherine de’Medici, the tenth of September, 1572.
“Lo sguardo del maggio ottentute proteggere suo da tutti I nemici.” May the gaze of the Gorgon protect her from her enemies.
Cosimo himself had made the annotation—his initials were boldly inscribed below the note—and he had sent the piece to his niece, who had married into the royal family of France, and become queen. No one at that time in history, David knew, was more besieged by her enemies than the Queen of France, who, facing an insurrection from the Huguenots, had ordered the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on August 23 of that same year. In reality, the purge had lasted weeks, during which time thousands of her religious enemies were rounded up and slaughtered all over France. It was later said that the wicked Italian queen had followed the advice of her countryman, Niccolò Machiavelli, who warned that it was best to kill all your enemies in one blow.
David fell back in his chair, trying to sort through it all. If this was indeed the one and only Medusa, then it could not have the powers Cellini had claimed or he would not have given it away … unless he’d had no choice. Could the duke have forced his hand? There were a hundred threats and forms of torture the Duke de’Medici could have employed. And perhaps the phrase, “from the hand of the artist,” did not so much mean a willing gift as a tribute pried from an artisan unable to refuse or resist.
One way or another, though, this mirror had gone to France—where Cellini himself had spent a good deal of his life, in the employ of the French king—and it was the only one whose trail David could now follow. As a gift to the queen, it would naturally have become a part of the royal jewels. For all David knew, it was still a part of whatever remained of that once-impressive collection. Whether it had the powers it was reputed to possess, or not, it was what Mrs. Van Owen had sent him to find—and find it he would. Shaking it loose, for any amount of money, from the French patrimony, seemed an utter impossibility—even for someone of Mrs. Van Owen’s resources—but he would cross that bridge when he came to it. For the moment, he just wanted to share the news with Olivia and get cracking.
With facsimiles of the two pages, produced by a copying machine carefully calibrated to work in low light and heat, tucked away in his valise, he raced back to the Laurenziana. He could have called Olivia on the way, but he wanted the pleasure of seeing her face when he presented his discovery from the Medici account books. In addition to the more personal feelings for her that he could no longer deny, he had also come to value her opinion—and approval—more highly than anyone else’s. She was a true eccentric, there was no denying that, quirky and volatile, but she was also one of the most widely read and original thinkers he had ever encountered. Most of her scholarly papers and monographs—and she had shared a few with David—were unfinished and unpublished, but they betrayed a wealth of knowledge on subjects ranging from the philosophy of Pico della Mirandola to the evolution of the early European banking system. It was as if her mind could not be focused on one subject long enough to see it through to its natural conclusion. Instead, she would get distracted and follow some beckoning side path—invariably finding something valuable there, too—without ever bothering to get back to her original argument.
But when David burst into their alcove, Olivia wasn’t there. She might have been sleeping late that morning—David knew that she was a night owl—and it was also possible that she was off leading one of her tour groups. David was paying her a stipend out of Mrs. Van Owen’s account, but Olivia had plainly stated that she wanted to keep her other sidelines alive. “Otherwise, what do I do when you leave me to go back to Chicago?”